Playbill - The End of the Moon by Laurie Anderson
Contents
- Introduction
- Tonight's Program
- About Laurie Anderson
- More About Laurie Anderson
- Laurie Anderson talks about The End of the Moon
Introduction
This Performance Supported by W. Richard and Joyce Summerwill
The End of the Moon
World Premiere
Wednesday, September 29, 2004 - 8 p.m.
Conceived and Performed by Laurie Anderson
Lighting Design by Jennifer Tipton
Sound Design by Jody Elff
Worldwide Tour Representation: Pomegranate Arts
Commissioned in part by: BITE '05 Barbican, London; Cal Performances, University of California, Berkeley, CA; University of Florida Performing Arts, Gainesville, FL; and Society for the Performing Arts, Houston, TX; Auditorium Parco della Musica, Roma.
Tonight's Program
The End of the Moon is the second in a series of Laurie Anderson's new solo works. Anderson's signature work combines stories, songs and music in a low-tech setting to create an ambitiously large picture of contemporary American culture.
Anecdotal, wide ranging and epic, The End of the Moon also features new music for violin and electronics.
Since her pioneering multi-media work United States, Anderson's subject has often been technology and culture. Of The End of the Moon she writes, "I find that the best way to look at our culture these days is not through a multi-media show, but with the simpler and sharper tools of words."
As NASA's first artist-in-residence, Anderson will draw on her recent research and travels. Part travelogue, part personal theories, history and dreams, The End of the Moon looks at the relationships between war, esthetics, spirituality and consumerism.
Following the great critical and popular success of Happiness, The End of the Moon will explore the contemporary meanings of freedom and time as well as the tangled ways in which we decide what is beautiful now.
NS Electric Violin Design: Ned Steinberger
Lighting Design: Jennifer Tipton
Sound Design: Jody Elff
Production Manager: Bill Berger
Press Representation: Annie Ohayon Media Relations, Annie Ohayon and Jason Fox
Special Thanks: Bert Ulrich, Rande Brown, Ned Steinberger, Michael Morris, Cheryl Kaplan, Karin Berg, Guy Lesser, Linda Brumbach,, Timothy Ferris, Dennis Overbye, Jill Dombrowski, Alisa Regas, Annie Ohayon. And, as always, Lou Reed.
Worldwide Tour Representation for The End of the Moon:
Pomegranate Arts
632 Broadway, Suite 901
New York, NY 10012
tel: 212.228.2221
fax: 212.475.0004
email: info@pomarts.com
Director: Linda Brumbach
Associate Director: Alisa E. Regas
Business Manager: Kaleb Kilkenny
Company Manager: Jim Woodard
Administrative Assistant: Kelly Kivland
For more information on Pomegranate Arts and Laurie Anderson's The End of the Moon tour, please visit www.pomegranatearts.com.
Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson is one of today's premier performance artists. Known primarily for her multi-media presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist and instrumentalist.
"O Superman" launched Anderson's recording career in 1980, rising to number two on the British pop charts and subsequently appearing on Big Science, the first of her seven albums on the Warner Brothers label. Other record releases include Mister Heartbreak, United States Live, Strange Angels, Bright Red, and the soundtrack to her feature film Home of the Brave. A deluxe box set of her Warner Brothers output, Talk Normal, was released in the fall of 2000 on Rhino/Warner Archives. In 2001, Anderson released her first record for Nonesuch Records, entitled Life On A String, which was followed by Live in New York, recorded at Town Hall in New York City in September 2001 and released in May 2002.
Anderson has toured the United States and internationally numerous times with shows ranging from simple spoken word performances to elaborate multi-media events. Major works include United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), The Nerve Bible (1995), and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick, a multi-media stage performance based on the novel by Herman Melville. Songs and Stories for Moby Dick toured internationally throughout 1999 and 2000. In the fall of 2001, Anderson toured the United States and Europe with a three-person band, performing music from Life On A String. She has also presented many solo works, her most recent being Happiness, which premiered in 2001 and toured internationally through spring 2003.
Anderson has published six books, the most recent of which is Laurie Anderson by RoseLee Goldberg (Abrams, 2000), a retrospective of her visual work. Text from Anderson's solo performances appears in the book Extreme Exposure, edited by Jo Bonney. She has also written the entry for New York for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Laurie Anderson's visual work has been presented in major museums throughout the United States and Europe. In 2003, The Musée Art Contemporain of Lyon in France produced a touring retrospective of her work entitled The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson. This retrospective encompasses installation, audio, video and art objects and spans Anderson's career from the 1970s to her most current works. It will continue to tour through 2005. As a visual artist, Anderson is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York.
As composer, Anderson has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme; dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Molissa Fenley; and a score for Robert LePage's theater production, Far Side of the Moon. She has created pieces for National Public Radio, The BBC and Expo 92 in Seville. In 1997 she curated the two-week Meltdown Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London. Her orchestra work Songs for A.E. premiered at Carnegie Hall in February 2000, played by the American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.
Recognized worldwide as a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts, Anderson collaborated with Interval Research Corporation, a research and development laboratory founded by Paul Allen and David Liddle, in the exploration of new creative tools, including the "Talking Stick." She created the introduction sequence for the first segment of the PBS special "Art 21," a series about art in the 21st century. Her awards include the 2001 Tenco Prize for Songwriting in San Remo, Italy, and the 2001 Deutsche Schallplatten prize for Life On A String.
In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA. Other current projects include a commission to create a series of audio-visual installations and a high definition film for the World Expo 2005 in Japan and a series of programs for French radio. She will premier her new score "O!" at the Opera Garnier in Paris in December 2004. She was also recently part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in Athens. Her next project will involve a series of long walks. Anderson lives in New York City. For more information on Laurie Anderson please visit www.laurieanderson.com.
More About Laurie Anderson
"I am not an expert, I am an artist"
-Laurie Anderson plays the angles
by Steve Horowitz
Laurie Anderson is the poster child of performance art, whose spiky hair and stringless violin (played with beams of light) has become the most recognizable icon of the genre. She's been ridiculed by pompous, closed-minded critics of the National Endowment of the Arts, stand-up comedians and late-night talk show hosts as the embodiment as what's wrong with contemporary art. She has also been championed as the priestess of a new fine arts form. Part of this has been the result of Anderson's high visibility and popularity. (Quick: name three performance artists.) She has released seven albums, including the five-volume set United States, on a major record label, garnering a number 2 pop single on the British charts with "O Superman" from her first disc and breaking the top 100 album charts in America with her second, Mister Heartbreak. She also has been involved in the movie industry. She wrote, directed, and starred in her own concert film Home of the Brave, which grossed well over a million dollars, as well scoring the Jonathan Demme/Spaulding Gray underground hit flick, Swimming to Cambodia.
The other reason has been Anderson's willingness to take artistic risks. She willingly looks goofy and takes political potshots at those in power to make her points. Her song lyrics frequently resemble Zen koans in their paradoxical combination of simplicity and deep thought. Consider the opening of "Night in Baghdad" from her 1994 release Bright Red:
"And oh it's so beautiful
It's like the Fourth of July
It's like a Christmas tree
It's like the fireflies on a summer night."
Her allusion to the portrayal of Desert Storm on television is disturbing because what's really happening goes unmentioned. That's her point, to show how disconnected the brutality of war is from the observer, and indeed how absurdly delightful the image is. Anderson's protagonist, in this case a war correspondent, gleefully assumes an objective persona, which suggests how immoral such a stand is. (The war itself may be viewed as necessary or not, but the horror of destruction is inherently abhorrent.) Anderson voluntarily assumes the first person role, but she is sometimes mocked because of the willingly naïve parts she plays-her detractors mistaking the artist for the characters.
Chicago-born Anderson studied violin as a teenager, earned her B.A. in art history from Barnard College and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University. She taught at the City College of New York before beginning her career as a performer. She began by taking her act to the city streets. One notable early piece consisted of her wearing ice skates and standing on a block of ice while playing her violin. Her performance ended when the ice melted away. She has frequently used science as a metaphor in her works. Her first major label album was even called Big Science.
Critics sometimes have called her a space cadet because of the way-out personas she has assumed in her work. Therefore it seems especially ironic that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) chose Anderson to be the organization's first Artist-in-Residence. For the past two years Anderson has traveled from site to site, interviewing scientists and technicians, and has created tonight's new performance piece, The End of the Moon. It's the second part of a trilogy of solo works that combines stories, songs and music that address the complex relationship between technology and culture. Like Happiness, the first part of the trilogy, The End of the Moon is said to look at the connections between art, war, spirituality and consumerism in contemporary America.
"I tried to approach the project in a big way," Anderson said over the telephone from her New York City residence. "I didn't want to focus on one small aspect, but I tried to absorb as much as I could and present what I've learned. I am not an expert, I am an artist. I look at things from a slightly different angle." However, she continually noted the strong similarity between what NASA workers did and arts of all kinds.
"Think about the projects they are working on. What could be more avant-garde than building a stairway to space? Or the way they translate digital data from a receiver into color. How does one decide which is blue when decoding a non-visible spectrum into a visual one? These require imaginative choices," Anderson said. On a more existential level, Anderson realized that what one considers the hard facts of science are only theories and illusions when applied to the larger scales of space and time.
"I thought gravity was a force but learned scientists believe there is no such thing. We have a department of space, but we don't have a time department. We don't understand the vast amount of time that space reveals to us. The earth itself has existed for only a very small part of cosmic time and shows how absolutely relative time is-that there are galaxies billions of years older than our own," according to Anderson. Comprehending such notions makes one reflective and philosophical. If everything and everyone on Earth were destroyed, the moon would still revolve around the earth, the earth would still orbit the sun. Nothing fundamental would be changed.
Anderson finds this hopeful and this gives her a reverence for life. "I agree with the astronauts. No one else is out there. We are not the last beings in the universe, but the first," Anderson said. She imagines that one day there will be a greening of Mars as human beings start to populate the cosmos. Anderson knows there's always a dark side to such endeavors. She noted that historically exploration has always been preceded by militarization. "Have you seen the movie Fog of War? Robert McNamara said that they considered exploding a nuclear weapon on the moon. That scared me. I never heard of that before," Anderson said.
Anderson said while at NASA she found herself drawn to nanotechnology and robotics. "Nanotechnology deals with minute processes where biology and electronics meet. For example, one can grow nanotubes like one can grow crystals. These are super strong structures with many potential uses," Anderson gushed. She couldn't explain why these fascinated her except that she found the whole concept "beautiful."
As for robotics, Anderson explained how heroic she thought were the individuals who manufactured the Rovers that successfully landed on Mars. "They took what was once a fictional idea and made it work. There was such a huge range of complications, Mars is so far away and there were so many things that could have gone wrong, but they did it. It's really an incredible achievement," Anderson said.
She brings her still, small voice to the stage to express her vision-that and a sampler and her violin. She will perform solo. Despite the epic grandeur of her subject, Anderson said that her presentation will be very modest. Everything on stage will emerge from her Powerbook computer, and at the time of the interview she was not sure if she would even supply visuals. "Pictures aren't necessary to understand all this beauty," she said. She refused to discuss the particulars of The End of the Moon other to say that it's all about the words and music. "As I become older I have discovered that for me, the best way to examine our culture is not through a multi-media show, but through the simpler and sharper tools of words."
Steve Horowitz is an adjunct assistant professor of American Studies at The University of Iowa. He has written and continues to teach the class 45:75, American Music: Rock and Roll in America as a Guided Correspondence Course. He is also a contributing editor of Little Village.
This article first appeared in a slightly different form, as the cover story of the September issue of Little Village, Iowa City's news and culture magazine, and is used by permission.
The Beginning of The End of the Moon-Laurie Anderson talks about her latest work
An interview with Laurie Anderson about her new solo work The End of the Moon as well as other current projects.
Q: Tell me about The End of the Moon. Will it feature new music and new tools?
LA: Definitely new music. Music will be a big part of this work, bigger than in the last piece Happiness. Partly it's because I've been working with some great new systems. Technically my rig is shrinking at incredible rates and I'm so excited at how much power there can be in this software. I hate to sound like a salesman but really it used to take two huge trucks to carry what I can now put into two briefcases. Now suddenly I have a huge amount of flexibility, I can play so many gorgeous new sounds. It's like I'm finally learning how to improvise. There are still a couple of analog things in my set up but basically it's almost invisible now.
Q: Is there a general theme to The End of the Moon?
LA: I would say that time is the overall general theme. Our perception of time and how it affects us, how it changes us. That, as well as stories, the stories we tell ourselves so we can go on. And of course this is such a good time for stories! Election season is all about stories and it just comes down to whose story you like better, which one you can relate to. None of us are actually going to go out and take our own surveys.
Q: How did the title come about?
LA: The End of the Moon is, I guess, a phrase that has some of the melancholy I feel at the moment. Not just melancholy really. More like loss. Like I lost something and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Actually I think what I lost was a country. The last three years have been pretty tough, pretty alienating for a lot of people. And in this piece I'm trying to look at some of those things. On the other hand I see this as sort of a report that I'm making to wind up my time as artist-in-residence at NASA. So there are lots of colors in it.
Q: Where do you draw your inspiration? How do you decide which stories will be included in your work?
LA: I keep huge notebooks filled with stories, and fragments. I've kept these journals since I was 12. I check these out and then I decide what to work on based on things like-maybe it would make somebody laugh? Maybe because it's incredibly sad. Almost never because I think it expresses who I am. I'm not trying to express myself. That's not my goal at all. My collaboration is truly with the audience. Maybe part of that is flirting with the audience; part of it is having a kind of rapport with them. I try to imagine this collaboration and based on that I edit it.
Q: Do you try to make things simpler as you go along? Both in your work, and in general?
LA: I do try to make things simpler, and more to the point. Lou (her partner the musician Lou Reed) is very encouraging to me in this. If I'm hiding behind a simile, he'll say "Why don't you just say what you mean, instead of alluding to things all the time?" And sometimes he's really right.
Q: You presented an early version of this piece in February in Montréal as part of the Festival of Lights. You called the piece Beauty. Why was that? And are there still some of the themes from the Montréal work in The End of the Moon?
LA: I guess mainly I was curious about how I make my own categories. I mean, what is beauty? What do I think is beautiful and why? And from there I develop lots of weird little scenes, each in a way looking at different aspects of beauty: hope, fear, regret and so on.
Q: Why do solos feel so right for you, at this point in your career and in your life?
LA: My ambition is to be a troubadour, and to just absorb the world, and to try to express it in a very light way. Not in some heavy art model way with all those crushingly heavy double meanings. I'm trying to be lighter in general. I'm trying to understand things more, and produce less stuff. I think there's too much stuff in the world, already. I think if I had to say what there's not enough of, I would say, probably tenderness would be one. Another would be awareness.
Q: You've said that these are part of a trilogy of solo works. This is the second. How do these pieces work together?
LA: Happiness was journalistic. It was about going places and doing stuff. I went there, I saw that, I did that. A series of stories. The End of the Moon is about the queasy feelings you might have later. It's dreamier. More abstract. There is a lot more trepidation about the future. There's uncertainty. It's my best attempt at describing life at this moment. However, I'm trying not to use "I" so much. For me, The End of the Moon generates a lot of writing issues that Happiness simply didn't. But I'd love to just do these small solo shows for the rest of my life-Happiness, The End of the Moon, The Beginning of History, Beauty, PainS
Q: I felt that in Happiness you were telling your own story through those experiences. Do you feel like you're telling story through these mental places? Whose story?
LA: I'm not possessive in that way-whether it's you or me. One of the stories in The End of the Moon starts out in a hamster cage. I'm not sure whose story this is. Maybe it's the story of anyone who's ever been in a cage that gradually turned into a trap. You? Me? Whatever.
Q: Do you have any thoughts on the third piece?
LA: I would love to make just an endless number of these pieces. I'm kind of sorry I said "trilogy." I really enjoy making solo works because they leave me a lot more freedom than the larger multi-media things. I can jump around; I don't have to explain every move to a giant tech crew.
Q: Elaborate on the NASA residency. How did it happen? What kind of experience did you have? How was your presence received by the staff? NASA has had a roller coaster year. Was this a good year to be working with them? How do these experiences figure into the new work?
LA: I am going to talk a bit about my experiences at NASA in this work. It was really a big honor to be the first NASA artist-in-residence. Obviously my first question was "Can I go up?" I would give anything to go up there. Really anything! The answer was no. But I loved meeting the scientists and designers and of course I got to see a lot of amazing things. Drawing conclusions? Probably a lot of what I do over the next few years will be influenced by what I saw on all my travels around the NASA sites, and who I met, and what I saw and thought about.
Q: I was struck by the first time you said you wanted to write an "epic poem." I'm curious-what attracted you to this? Is it the sense of an oral tradition? You as troubadour going around singing and telling stories? Or is it the structure you like? The fact that it doesn't really have to have an end? What made you think of this?
LA: Endlessness is certainly appealing. Of course aspiring to write an "epic poem" is on the one hand inspiring and also utterly pretentious. Who do I think I am? But I like to be inspired in that way. Why not? I'd love to be able to write something with enormous scope. But epicSwhat does it mean? How does it start?
Often these huge poems are about a trip, about trying to get somewhere, getting lost on the way, and also about motion. There's a protagonist, of sorts, sometimes the narrator. Me? I'm trying to do that. Also I'm trying to jump quickly in and out of these imaginary scenes, absurd scenes. Just because it's fun. Just because I can.
Q: Are there poems that you, as you're writing, go back to, to solve problems? Do you think of it that way when you're constructing a work like this? Did you read things right before you wrote Happiness or The End of the Moon?
LA: I guess you can use poems to solve problems. But when I read it seems like I'm reading for pure pleasure, not in order to figure something out. One of my favorite writers is Anne Carson, so I would say if I were to think of how to solve something, I might think of her. Her book Autobiography of Red has some fascinating jump cuts. You could study that and learn how to write something in which time is really slithery.
The way time moves in epic poems is complicated. There are lots of time frames and also they're often about the distant past. Usually the author-the poet-wasn't there-and that has a lot of advantages. But there are ways to exit the drama, writing in the present tense too.
Q: You've been doing so many projects all over the world in the last two years. Let's start with World Expo 2005 in Japan which will open in April. Can you describe what you're planning?
LA: Several things actually. World Expo is of course a trade show-slash-cultural exhibition, and the theme is nature. They've commissioned projects from a few artists. Expo's official mascots are shrubs, stuffed shrubs, a large one and a small one, possibly father and son, which Lolabelle, my rat terrier, has completely shredded already.
I'm doing several big projects for Expo and the first is called "Walk" and it's series of visual installations in this huge garden as well as a binaural piece of music which you listen to on headphones as you walk. Binaural is beautiful, so very 3-D. I'm also working with some Japanese designers on a very cool infrared system that lets you access sounds on tiny wireless cards.
The other part of the project is a film on high definition video. It's so beautiful! I just haven't used images for a long time because I hate the way video looks. Now it's starting to look more and more like film, and I love it. We just finished shooting the film, and now we're cutting it. Basically it's twelve little sequences-songs, really, about the way we experience time.
In a way the whole project has been an excuse to work outside. The film will be shown on a giant Astrovision screen at Expo. We hope to screen parts of it in Times Square on a similar system as a test. Then in April I'll do a series of concerts in Japan as well. That should be fun.
Q: Tell us about Greece and the Olympics. You were working in Athens with the Olympics team for, what, a year and a half?
LA: Yeah. Actually I wasn't able to talk about any of this when it was happening but it was amazing. They asked me to work on writing the opening ceremony and also to be the narrator. You know, the one who welcomes the world to Athens. So I went back and forth to Athens a lot for about a year. And I got to work with all these amazing Greeks-writers, designers, choreographers. I just have to say, first of all, they're a lot smarter than we are. They're sharper, they've got sharper tools, they've got a sharper language. They just do. It's more elegant, it's more complicated, it's more complex. And I'm someone in love with English. But I was really aware that they came from the people who invented virtually everything that our civilization is based on-philosophy, geometry, physics, tragedy, sculpture, painting.
So it was-such a long story-a wonderful experience to work on making something with them. The top secret aspect was also a lot of the fun. I could never tell my friends where I was going-I'd just disappear. Then last December there was a big money crunch and, sad to say, I was among the casualties so I didn't get to be the narrator in the end.
Q: You also have two projects in France-one for French radio and the other for the Opera Garnier. How did these happen?
LA: The French Radio project started out when they asked me to do a project for their culture show. So I decided to do a diary, an audio diary. So I got this simple set-up of a minidisk player and tiny microphone like a spy microphone, and I carried it around with me everywhere and recorded things every day for several months. Just everyday things-people talking, atmospheres, taking my dog to the spa. Sound is such a powerful way to make a diary. Anyway it's sort of out of hand now, very long, like a miniseries. It's called "Nothing in my Pockets." The producers were just here, and we were trying to edit it but it seems like it's turning into a kind ofSI think it will air this spring.
Q: I know you're doing a walking project as well. Taking these ten-day walks. Is this connected to the French radio project?
LA: Well it started that way. I was in Milan, and I had just finished months of recording and I suddenly thought, maybe I should walk to Paris to mix this. Because walking is a lot like writing a diary. You don't know what's going to happen next, and doing a diary is completely bizarre-there's absolutely no plot, and these people appear, and you're reading it and you say, wow I didn't realize that so and so was going to be so important to meSAnyway, the problem with walking to Paris was the Alps. Which was a major problem.
Q: So how many places have you walked?
LA: The first walk was from Athens to Delphi, which was amazing. The idea was to walk along a very ancient road and this was the Sacred Way-the road of fate and answers. And it usually ends up at the temple of Delphi where the oracle was supposed to help you find out what you should do. I went in off season, and the oracle was only in season in summer, even in ancient times. So if you went in off season, like I did, in November, you would go instead to Pan's cave, and you would dance around, and do other stuff, getting ready for spring, and the spring-like things that would happen.
Q: A kind of pilgrimage?
LA: An anti-pilgrimage really. I'm trying to think of these walks as goal-less. Wandering. Looking. In fact I'm trying really hard in general to stop having goals. Goals have been getting in the way of a lot of things.
I just got back from the most recent one. It was along the Ridgeway, in Wiltshire-another very ancient road in southern England. It was the road you would take if you were a shepherd, because it winds through the crests of hills, so you could always look down and make sure that no one was coming to attack your flock, and you're protected-and it was a market road, that it would take you several weeks usually, to walk to the big markets in the north. It was like walking on the spine of a dragon.
I kept thinking I'm going to have some ideas on these walks, or that I'm going to be able to walk out a problem or something but no-my mind sort of goes blank, it's like "oh, this is beautiful," you're just dazzled by beauty, and that's all it is, it's just gorgeous. You just march along, and let all of those beautiful things be around you, and just be part of it.
Q: I always wanted to ask you if you would still be doing this, I mean performing, even if you didn't have an audience?
LA: I can't imagine producing a show entirely for myself. That would verge on the insane. I like it when audiences understand what I do. It makes me feel less lonely. And being in the studio day in and out can be excruciatingly lonely.
Q: You said that this new work looks at the relationship between aesthetics, spirituality war and consumerism. Do you think the world's negative reaction to the U.S. war with Iraq is more of an aesthetic difference or a moral one? In a world of war, do aesthetics really matter?
LA: This is a tough one. The relationship between morality and aesthetics is obviously extremely complex. One of my favorite quotes is Lenin's "Ethics is the aesthetics of the future." I love to wonder what that might mean! In the future we'll all be good to each other and so we won't need to make art? Other people in the world have a myriad of reasons for their negative reactions to U.S. policies.
If I had to say why we're at war, I would talk more about economics and power than about aesthetics. That said, what's right and what's beautiful are very mixed in people's minds. This is a very big topic in The End of the Moon. It continually threads through it. On the other hand, I don't want to make it sound theoretical. This piece is-I should say-very impressionistic, allusive, elusive. Meanings keep flying away.
Q: What's left that you haven't done, that you really want to do?
LA: What's left? Just about everything! Astrophysics, brain surgery, water colors. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be time for those things this time around, and I'm not so sure I'm coming back this way.
Q: Is there a particular emphasis on the outdoors in your current state of mind?
LA: Absolutely! These days I love looking up at huge oak trees and watching the way the branches stand out against the sky. That to me can take up the whole day. Kind of like when I was a child. I'm finding that the sky and weather and animals have a new fascination to me. If you'd asked about nature or the outdoors five years ago, I would've just thought, "That's pathetic!" I was more interested in situations and solutions, and technology. Now I'm going in another direction. What direction is it? Well, I'm improvising.
Q: Is there a limit to your curiosity? Is there anything that is off limits?
LA: Yes, pornographic sex. Is it off limits? I don't know-it's just never been a big subject for me. I also don't talk about madness, crazy people drooling. I guess because I think that I'm trying to talk to people who are more or less in their right minds. Or let's say, I think that the people who understand the stuff I do are probably the dreamers, like me.
Q: How do you relate to the feedback from the audience?
LA: Well, I like it when we fall into that communal dream.
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The University of Iowa Center for Macular Degeneration
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